What do you really need to know about SEO in 2016? Discover the important SEO factors you need to pay attention to this year.
LINK BUILDING
Quality backlinks to your website are one of the hardest SEO elements to get, but they are worth their weight in gold. Don’t go for low-quality, spammy links. Focus on high quality, authoritative links to your site.
RESPONSIVE WEBSITE
How does your website function on a smartphone? The quality of the mobile experience is a ranking factor. If your site is not responsive to various devices, you need a re-design STAT!
USER ENGAGEMENT
How long users stay on your website. How many pages they interact with. How frequently they follow your pre-determined sales funnel path. The search engines know how how people use your site and rank you accordingly.
QUALITY CONTENT
Content quality ties in with user engagement. Your website should offer high quality, unique content that users are looking for. Search engines want to provide quality content to the searchers.
FREQUENCY OF CONTENT
Search engines consider older content less relevant than newer content. As your content ages, your rankings drop. Quality, educational blogging is an easy way to maintain the frequency and freshness of your content.
SOCIAL SIGNALS
Social signals are controversial in the world of search engine rankings analysis. But, as the search engines rank more social content and measure your users’ engagement with your social content and traffic to your site, you are going to want strong social channels.
HTTPS
Website encryption is a small ranking signal, but it is increasing in significance. There are only a handful of ranking factors that Google will outright state. HTTPS is one of those factors, so having an SSL Certificate for your site is advised.
IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
There are multiple factors that go into image optimization. You want to name the image files correctly (all lowercase keywords separated by hyphens), size the dimensions correctly, optimize for file size, and add alt attributes at a minimum.
PAGE SPEED
How fast do your website pages load? Page speed is a very important factor in your website. Nobody likes slow loading pages. The search engines want their users to have great experiences on the websites they recommend. Slow sites never return a great experience.
KEYWORDS
You’ll hear lots of talk around “keywords are dead.” Nothing could be further from the truth. How we use keywords has changed dramatically, but you still need to have a very clear idea of what words your ideal audience is searching to find you.
